Republic Of Perl

Larry Wall Celebrates The Open-source Programming Movement

October 25, 1998|By Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News.

Under a banner proclaiming the "Programming Republic of Perl," Larry Wall delivered his State of the Onion address. The crowd ate it up.

Wall is the principal author of Perl, a computer language so essential to the functioning of the World Wide Web that many of your favorite sites would be worthless without it. He's become a hero in the programming community, and not just because of the quality of the software.

So it was no surprise that he drew fervent applause at the Perl Conference 2.0 in San Jose, Calif., at the end of the summer. It was the second annual gathering of programmers and Web-heads, more than 1,000 strong at this year's confab, who have helped make Perl such a precious resource.

In an interview after his speech, Wall summed up his philosophy of Perl with some catchy aphorisms: First, "There's more than one way to do it." Second, "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."

Perl is a leader in the "open source" movement, also known as "freeware," in which users freely download and use software. With open-source software, the original programming source code--the instructions programmers use to tell a computer how to behave--is also open to inspection, debugging and enhancement by other programmers who are then supposed to return their improvements to the wider user community.

Making money with freeware is fine, but the money tends to be made on services related to the software.

Perl isn't the only popular open-source product, nor the best known. Netscape gave the genre a huge boost this year when it contributed its popular browser, Navigator, and some related Internet software to the open-source movement. Linux is a Unix-like operating system that has gained all kinds of attention, and millions of users, in recent years.

Apache is a hugely popular Web server program, used to dish out Web pages and other information from Web site computers to browsers. Sendmail, an e-mail program, is almost ubiquitous among Internet service providers. And so on.

Perl has emerged as the most revered product in an essential niche. It has been called the glue that holds the Web together--a reasonably accurate description, says Dan Shafer, editorial director at Builder.com, a Web-building arm of the C-Net on-line technology news service. The Internet consists of wildly disparate kinds of computers and software, Shafer notes, and one of Perl's great contributions has been the way it helps Webmasters link various technologies in coherent ways.

Perl is also viewed by many programmers as a poster child for a kinder, gentler style of programming known as scripting. On the surface, and often in practice, Perl and other such languages bear a closer resemblance to natural speech than the more arcane syntax in the programming languages favored by programmers who need to squeeze out every extra ounce of performance and engineering elegance.

But while scripting languages are slower and less elegant by hardcore programming standards, they're powerful enough for most tasks--and considerably easier to learn and use.

Getting work done quickly is a necessity in Internet time. And Perl programmers can do things fast. That's another reason why you frequently encounter Perl-aided Web pages. If you filled out a Web form, for example, there's a good chance you ran a Perl program on the computer you contacted from your own machine. Some corporate information-systems people have sniffed at Perl, Linux and other open-source programs, but the closer you get to the trenches in major--and minor--enterprises the more likely you are to find people using them.

Wall isn't entirely surprised at Perl's wild success. It isn't the first time he's written Internet software; among his earlier efforts was the program RN, for reading Usenet newsgroups, Internet-based discussion boards. "I had a pretty good idea that anything I liked, other people would like," he said.

Perl has won fans throughout the Internet community. Its growing group of adherents, as with other open-source products, has devotedly helped improve the language over the years, and the current version is enormously more powerful than its predecessors. Wall is especially pleased with recent enhancements that could help spread Perl into other languages with a minimum of effort.

Wall's State of the Onion speech wandered around entertainingly, but came back to its essential point: that Perl and other open-source programs are essential in the computing world, and not necessarily the blood enemies of commercial software. That view is not shared by more militant freeware advocates, but it has won increasing support.

Wall's current employer is O'Reilly & Associates, a technology book and software company that has published many volumes on how to use a variety of freeware products including Perl; the company, which sponsored the conference in San Jose, also runs a popular Perl-oriented Web site (www.perl.com).

He says the open-source movement can coexist peacefully with commercial software, to the advantage of both. Meanwhile, he maintains a sane view of his own contributions, and uses several Perl-related metaphors along the way.

Natural pearls are grown in layers, he told his San Jose audience, "around a grain of sand that irritates the oyster in question . . . I realize this analogy classifies me as a mere irritant."

If you imagine the Perl world as an onion (pearl onion; get it?), Wall is a dot in the middle. "While I may have started all this," he observed, "most of the mass is in the outer layers"--where thousands upon thousands of Perl users are inventing new ways to use the versatile technology.

"There's a lesson to those who want to be inner-ringers," he says. "That's not where the power is--in this movement, anyway."